My tools

Why an inventory, rather than a shopping list

A tool list on a job page answers what does this work need. It is the same list for everybody, and by the third job most of it is telling you about things already in your van. An inventory answers the question that is actually in front of you — what do I not have yet — and it only has to be answered once.

Which means the value is in the gap, not in the ticks. A job that needs fourteen tools and shows you two is a job you can start on Monday. The same job showing you two, one of which is a wet saw, is a hire booking you would otherwise have made on site.

What “owned” is taken to mean

On site rather than in existence. A grinder at the back of a garage behind a lawnmower is not a tool you have on a Tuesday, and marking it owned quietly removes it from every gap list afterwards. The same goes for the one with a blunt blade, a dead battery or a lead somebody borrowed.

Consumables are deliberately absent. Blades, discs, mixing paddles, sandpaper and sealant are materials — they get used up, they belong in the bill of materials, and an inventory that mixes them in is never accurate for more than a week.

Where this is kept

In this browser, on this device. There is no account and no copy on a server, because there is no server — which also means clearing your site data clears this, and the workspace backup is the only way to move it to another machine.

Generic tool types only — no brands, no models and no rankings, because this site has not tested tools. No prices either: a band that held across four markets and four currencies for a generic tool type could not be sourced, and an invented one is worse than none.